Shame Is for Other People

The myriad ways that overweight women are body-shamed has received extensive media coverage in recent years. Doctors fat-shame their patients during routine exams. Fans fat-shame celebrities who post less-than-perfect images of their bodies on Instagram. The fitness industry relies on fat-shaming to market its products.

Even respected reporters do it. Appearing on NPR’s “On Point” back in December 2017, Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker compared the size of Sarah Huckabee Sander’s body to President Trump’s proposed border wall.

“She’s lar–I have to watch my descriptors here because I don’t want to say anything physically insulting but she is, um, you know, she provides a, uh, barrier, essentially, between the American public and White House.” In response, The Hill ran an opinion piece from a conservative writer with the headline, “Liberal women should be ashamed of their body-shaming.”

This writer’s response captures an apparent contradiction in public views on the value of shame. On the one hand, shame has gotten a bad name as a repressive social force, the favored tool of perfectionism and intolerance, a weapon employed by bullies everywhere against their victims. It was wrong for Kathleen Parker to fat-shame the press secretary; from this perspective, shame is bad.

At the same time, strident public voices regularly insist that plenty of people have some very good reasons to feel ashamed, and they ought to! Usually those people sit across the aisle from us on the political divide, as was the case for the conservative opinion writer in The Hill who wanted to shame her liberal opponents. If only “they” would acknowledge the shame they so richly deserve to feel, they’d see the error of their ways.

From this perspective, shame is good… provided it applies to someone we disapprove of or dislike.

These two divergent views came into focus during my research for my forthcoming book Shame (St. Martin’s Press, November 6, 2018). Early in the process, I set up Google Alerts for the appearance of several search terms relevant to my topic, especially those appearing in newspaper articles online. Shame, ashamed, shameless, I’m not ashamed of, ought to be ashamed. I felt curious to see how and when those words would appear in the popular media.

Many of these articles featured men and women proclaiming to the world that they were not ashamed about their weight, sexual orientation, gender identity, prior divorce, of having had an abortion or struggled with an addiction, been raped or sexually abused, or suffered from mental illness and a variety of physical disabilities. None of this came as a surprise. Our age is characterized by what I’ve referred to elsewhere an “anti-shame zeitgeist”: a great many people of all ages have come to regard social shame as a toxic force of oppression that must be resisted.

I was unprepared for the larger number of articles insisting that certain other people had something to feel ashamed about. Day after day, Google Alerts sent me links to authors wagging an angry finger and shaming bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, doctors who fat-shame their patients, greedy industrialists, blatant tax evaders, uncaring politicians, criminals without remorse, neglectful parents, etc. By shaming others, we often express our support for the values of tolerance, compassion, fairness, and a sense of social responsibility… but sometimes we wield shame as a means to delegitimize our opponents.

In recent years, shame has become increasingly weaponized within the realm of politics. On both sides of the divide, politicians will denounce their opponents as shameless, or insist that they ought to feel ashamed of themselves for holding this or that position. Pundits and writers of letters to the editor will insist that members of a certain political party should feel tremendous shame for holding opinions with which the author does not agree.

The lesson I’ve learned through my research is this: Millions of Americans from both sides of the aisle agree that shame is bad when directed at themselves or their allies, but good when applied to people they hate, or with whom they disagree.

No one captures this dynamic better than Donald J. Trump, whom Adam Haslett, writing for The Nation, once labelled the “Shamer in Chief,” but who has also been described by countless commentators as “shameless.” On a personal level, Trump bats away any charge that he ought to feel ashamed and instantly tries to humiliate his critics with contempt and ridicule.

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I have no reason to feel ashamed, but you certainly do.

Trump invites his supporters to follow his example. As Haslett points out, Trump’s “skill is precisely this: to create an entire national theater of shame in which he induces that very emotion in his followers, on the one hand, while on the other saving them from having to acknowledge its pain by publicly shaming others instead.”

Meanwhile, outraged voices on the left regularly denounce the President and openly try to shame him. They ridicule Trump with a long list of rude and sometimes hilarious epithets. They also dismiss his followers as dupes, suckers, and thoughtless cretins, making use of language that, intentionally or not, tends to belittle, humiliate, and dehumanize them. Liberals despise shame when directed at the disadvantaged or innocently different, but they relish shame when they can wield it against their opponents.

Shame – bad for us, good for them.

It has become cliché to note that Trump is not the cause but rather a symptom of our uncivil age, giving voice to what has long lurked below the surface. When it comes to our dualistic view of the value of shame – bad for us, good for them – he does so once again. First, he articulates the anti-shame zeitgeist by implicitly telling his audience, Don’t let them make you feel ashamed! Then, he explains to whom that feeling actually belongs: Your enemies are the truly shameful people!

For the first and perhaps only time in his Presidency, Donald J. Trump actually does speak for all Americans everywhere when he articulates what we all believe.

Shame is for other people.